The women of Fox News are not about to let Erick Erickson off lightly for his recent comments, on Lou Dobbs’ show, about male superiority being a scientific fact. Last night, on her blog, Greta Van Susteren asked if they’d lost their minds. Then today, Megyn Kelly brought both Erickson and Dobbs onto her show and went at them with both barrels, while they alternately tried to explain what they’d really meant, and smirked in a way that made me want to throw my computer out the window.
Kelly started by asking Erickson: “What makes you dominant and me submissive and who died and made you scientist-in-chief?” Erickson tried to hedge a bit: “It doesn’t have anything to do with submissiveness, per se, and it was certainly poorly constructed how I said it,” but he added that in nature, male animals tended to be the protectors and the dominant ones. “We’ve gotten to a point in this country where you have a lot of feminists that think male and female roles are completely interchangeable...[and] a lifestyle choice… No one is saying women can’t be or shouldn’t be a breadwinner or even the primary breadwinner.” What he didn’t like, he said, was that we’d forced ourselves into a place where they have to be.
“That is not exactly what you you have been saying for the last couple of days,” Kelly retorted. She also noted that there was plenty of data to suggest that children of working moms wound up just as healthy and able to thrive in society than the children of stay-at-home mothers. Erickson disputed that data because it was “self-selective” – that the studies "leftists" refer to are typically of higher income families. In the middle class, where you have mom working 12 hours a day and dad working 12 hours a day, that was different. (Really? Maybe they have to work 12 hours a day to make ends meet because Fox's beloved Reaganomics has so eroded the position of the middle class.) “I’m not judging them and no one should…” he began, but Kelly interrupted, “You are judging them. I didn’t like what you wrote one bit.” She also noted that for decades people believed children of interracial marriages were biologically inferior.
Dobbs took a bit of a different tack, as he explained to Kelly (calling her "O Dominant One" in the process): he blamed the rise of the female breadwinner on our society, where “change is the absolute hallmark” for example the loss of traditional male-dominated jobs like construction and manufacturing. He said three times as many people in a single-parent household were likely to end up with psychological problems, leading to drugs and gangs and boys unable to go to law school and what not.
Eventually, after a good deal of yelling, the segment ended. Dobbs and Erickson were still smirking.
(4/21/19 update: Video now available via Mediaite)
But not Megyn Kelly.
Why not her? Let’s refresh her history:
This is the same Megyn Kelly that defended her maternity leave, while advocating no other woman have the right to it.
This is the same Megyn Kelly that admitted she gets coverage similar to the contraception mandate, protected herself on it, then immediately started slut shaming Sandra Fluke.
This is the same Megyn Kelly that is on record as thinking the War on Women is a good thing, because she thinks she’ll somehow be exempt if the GOP wins it.
This is the same Megyn Kelly that applauded a man beating a woman half his size named Lana Rosas until she was in a coma, then threatened everyone who criticized her for it with a lawsuit.
Megyn Kelly only cares about persecution or violence against women when it personally affects Megyn Kelly. I can’t think of one time where she didn’t parade for everyone but herself to be a victim of the policy/practice. That is literally the only consistency she has, professionally or personally.
Not only that, but the way she went about it reeks of her using it as a smokescreen to go after Erickson for something more personal that we’ll probably never know about. While the GOP Civil War fun factor is off the charts here, let’s be honest… If she wasn’t getting even for something done against her (or that she thinks was done against her) personally, she’d be telling us all to shut up and “get some context.”
So I’m sorry about whatever really grew a hair in your ass, Megyn… But I very much doubt your outrage is even half as genuine as the other Fox News women who spoke up.
